AWS Directory Services allows you to join AWS resources to Microsoft Active Directory. This includes Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS), Amazon FSx, Amazon Workspaces, Amazon Appstream 2.0, Amazon Connect, Amazon QuickSight, Amazon WorkDocs, Amazon WorkMail, and of course Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) Windows instances. In addition, AWS recently announced the ability to Seamlessly Domain Join Linux EC2 Instances. As I modernize .NET applications by moving to .NET 5 and Linux, I can continue to leverage Active Directory for credential management.

In the post, I will show you how to build a Linux container in Visual Studio running on a EC2 Windows Instance. The AWS Toolkit for Visual Studio allows you to deploy your project to Elastic Container Service (ECS) Fargate and recently as a container image to AWS Lambda among other options. In both of these cases, you must build a Linux container from Visual Studio or the dotnet command line.

I have been testing a a preview of a new PowerShell command, Import-EC2Instance, that will be added to the AWS PowerShell API next week. The new command allows you to import a VM from VMware or Hyper-V. I covered this in my book, but at the time the functionality was not available in PowerShell and I had to use the Java API. While the new command will upload and convert your VM, you can also do the upload and convert independently.

I have been building a bunch of Windows AMIs for EC2 recently. If the instance fails to build it can be a real bear to diagnose issues. You don't have access to the console to watch what's happening. It would be great if I could log to the EC2 Console (also called the System Log on the web site) so I knew what was happening. So I hacked the EC2Config Service to see how it was writing to the console.